Customer Reviews

Corregidora

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I read the book after I'd already gone through The Healing and it made me understand why her debut astonished the literary community. She created a deep bluesy world in which to explore themes of love, geneology, black matriarchy, memory, forgiveness, loyalty...One wishes she could have told more stories, had a career trajectory like Morrison's but her personal life did not accomodate her gift. Ursa Corregidora is a beautiful blues singer in 1930's middle America. A tragic accident (or is it?) leaves her unable to bear children and tormented by the twisted lineage of a line of women that will end with her. I would recommend the book for anyone interested in women's fiction, black historical fiction, American fiction. Similar theme to Beloved but much more spare prose style, much is left for the reader to infer, improvise. A slim, powerful book.

This book gripped me in a way few others have - the intermingling of past and present, slavery and so-called "freedom," drove home the realities of oppression. When a woman whose only source of power is the ability to "make generations" is unable to have children, it echoes with a scream of despair. I recently read an article about the author, who was apparently in an abusive marriage that ended recently with her husband's suicide - and attempted murder of her. No wonder she was able to convey pain in such a vivid way.

From the time that Ursa Corregidora is able to listen, she is told by her great-grandmother that she must retain "the evidence" in order to pass it on to her children. Initially, one would think this is a harmless request. However, "the evidence" is an oral history of how her great-grandmother was raped and then used as a whore by her white slave owner, Corregidora, as was her daughter (Ursa's grandmother) after her. Corregidora then impregnates Ursa's grandmother (his biological daughter) to produce Ursa's mother. Not only is this a disturbing history for a child to commit to memory, but her great-grandmother's resentment and distrust of men were also passed onto a young Ursa.

Although Ursa had a black father, she resembles the Portuguese Corregidora. Her light skin and fine hair causes her to be ostracized by black women and desired by black men. She expresses her lifelong frustrations in the form of song and has moderate success as a blues singer in the small local club circuit. Ursa finds herself suffering emotionally, verbally, and physically at the whim of her husband, Mutt, who begins to exhibit the same jealousy, possessiveness, and envy that her great-grandmother shared regarding her relationship with Corregidora.

Through flashbacks and internal memories, we understand Ursa's mental anguish when trying to discern between the painful slave legacy and her present day household situation. True to the mindset of the time, a woman's childbearing ability is looked upon as her only source of power and we see Ursa's torment further exacerbated when her ability to pass "the evidence" to her children is jeopardized.

This book addresses racism, slavery, and sexism on several different levels. Be warned-- it grips the reader from the beginning and goes deep in a very "Alice Walker-ish" kind of way. I experienced difficulty following the dialogue at times but I hung in there and relied on inference to follow the author's insinuations; and despite this one `snag', I was not disappointed with Ms. Jones's first novel. This is a short but complex read; it is not for everyone, however I found it was a worthwhile literary departure from the "norm."

Reviewed by Phyllis
APOOO BookClub
April 4, 2003

It is hard for me to review a book such as this. I do so as a woman, not as a black woman, so i realize that my thoughts will be lacking. As a woman from a culture (sicilian)that also puts so much emphasis on remembering not only the wrongs done to you, but all those done to your family, and growing up primarily with stories of hate, I was able to connect with the heroine of this book. I understood her anger, confusion, and need to find herself. This book contains a sublime beauty that is nearly impossible to explain.

I didn't know I could be moved to feel, like I was after reading this book. It really inspired me moved me and it now one of my favorite books and one of my favorite writers

This was a very interesting book from start to finish. It tells the story of Ursa and the evidence she was meant to pass on from her mother grandmother and great gram who were slaves..sex slaves at that. Anyway, I agree that the book was complex and short, I wish there would've been more. The explicit language and sex scenes aren't for everyone. Overall very good book.

Corregidora is a wild ride into the sordid clash of race, identity, bi-raciality, multi-culturalism and self acceptance. I read it when I was very young and its effect still resonates. Gayl Jones is a master of the surreal and Corregidora as well as Eva's Man are must read classics. Her style reminds me of Djuna Barnes, and like Barnes, it is not an easy read, but a worthy one.

I first read Corregidora as an assignment for my creative writing course in college. Usually with a gripe for such readings, it was immediately apparent why the professor had chosen this book. Corregidora is an essential look into America's past: the people, the places, and the dark events that shaped a culture. Ursa is a prime example of the hardships faced by women during that time and still do in some parts of the world. This story stands to remind us, well into the future, of the struggles people face even today.

A.E.H. Veenman, an author and reviewer

A review by Dr. Joseph Suglia

When I first heard the title of this book -- CORREGIDORA (1987) -- I thought it was "corrigenda."

Corrigenda: a list of errors in a published manuscript.

* * * * *

When a literary artist belongs to a community that is denied cultural, economic, and political authority, she is often expected to write in the name of that community. All of her work, it is assumed, deals with the common experience of "her race"-and has no other significance besides. She becomes the spokeswoman of "her people," a substitute voice for the members of her "oppressed" group, who have the same problems as her. Since racism is based on the assumption of an identification between race and personhood, it should hardly be surprising that literary artists who belong to minority cultures are regarded as the surrogates of these cultures, as representatives who are predetermined to write about "their culture's" marginal status.

The writing of Gayl Jones has been traditionally received in this way. Like Toni Morrison, Jones is customarily referred to as an "African-American novelist," as if the totality of her literary output were reducible to the problems of "her community," as if the communal experience of racialization were inscribed on every page that she has ever produced. The significance of Jones' masterwork, Corregidora (1975), however, is not reducible to the race of its author.

At the novel's opening, lounge singer Ursa Corregidora is shoved down a staircase by her husband, Mutt-a catastrophic blow that results in her infertility. After she renounces her husband, Ursa enters into a relationship with Tadpole, the owner of the Happy Café, the bar at which she performs. Like all of her significant relationships with men, this second relationship proves disastrous and doomed to failure. Every man in the novel, without exception, sees Ursa as a "hole"-that is, as a beguiling and visually appealing thing to be penetrated. The narrative suggests this on the figural level. A talented novelist, Jones weaves images of orifices throughout her text-tunnels that swallow, and tighten around, trains, lamellae such as nostrils, vaginas, and mouths, wounds, etc. Although one of Ursa's "holes" is barren, another "hole" is bountifully "prosperous" [171]-her mouth, from which the "blues" issue. A movement of sonic exteriorization corresponds to a counter-movement of vaginal interiorization.

It is easy to be trapped by these more immediate, socio-sexual dimensions of the narrative. Corregidora may seem, prima facie, to be nothing more than another novel about a woman imprisoned in abusive and sadistic relationships with appropriative men. But the meanings of Corregidora are far more profound than this. A "transcendental" framework envelops the immediate narrative and casts it in relief, thereby enhancing its significance. We learn that Ursa is the great-granddaughter of Portuguese slave-trader and procurer, Corregidora, who sired both Ursa's mother and grandmother. Throughout the course of the novel, the men in Ursa's life take on a resemblance to Corregidora-and this resemblance sheds light on both the sexual basis of racism and the tendency of "oppressed" cultures to take on the traits of imperialist hegemonies. According to the logic of the novel, the children of slaves resemble either slaves or slave drivers. Even within communities born of slavery, the novel suggests, persist relationships of enslavement. "How many generations had to bow to his genital fantasies?" [59], Ursa asks at one point. As long as hierarchical relationships form between women and men, Jones' novel suggests, there will never be an end to this period of acquiescence; Corregidora will continue to achieve posthumous victories.

A typical response to genocide is the injunction to remember. Although her infertility robs Ursa of the ability to "make generations" [10]-something that, she is taught, is the essence of being-woman-she can still "leave evidence" [14], can still attest to the historical memory of slavery. All documents that detailed Corregidora's treatment of his slaves were seemingly destroyed, as if the abolition of slavery abolished memory itself. According to the injunction of the Corregidora women (Ursa's ancestors), one must testify, one must re-member, one must "leave evidence." And yet memory is precisely Ursa's problem. Memory cripples her. Throughout the novel, Ursa struggles to overcome the trauma of her personal past. And this past-in particular, the survival in memory of her relationship with Mutt-belongs to the larger, communal past that is her filial legacy. Her consciousness is rigidified, frozen in the immemorial past of the Corregidora women. This "communal" past is doomed to repeat itself infinitely, thus suspending the presence of the present-and, in particular, Ura's individual experience of the present. Her individual experience of the present is indissociably married to her personal past, and her most intimate past is, at the same time, also the past of her community. The words that Ursa uses to describe her mother could also apply to Ursa herself: "It was as if their memory, the memory of all the Corregidora women, was her memory too, as strong with her as her own private memory, or almost as strong" [129].

At the shocking and unforgettable close of the novel, the past and present coincide almost absolutely. When, after twenty-two years of estrangement, Ursa is reunited with her first husband, the historical memory of slavery is superimposed and mapped onto their relationship. Both Ursa and Mutt become allegorical figures, each representing slave and slaveholder, respectively. The present-past and the past-present reflect each other in an infinite mirror-play until they both become almost indistinguishable from each other.

At the juncture of both temporalities is an inversion of power relations that comes by way of a sex act. Ursa performs fellatio on her first husband. Oral sex replaces oral transmission. Here we have the perpetuation of a traumatic past, and yet it is a repetition with a difference. Fellatio is disempowering for the man upon whom it is performed; dangerously close to emasculation, it is experienced as "a moment of broken skin but not sexlessness, a moment just before sexlessness, a moment that stops just before sexlessness" [184]. For the woman, by contrast, it may be an act vacant of all sensuality, one that is abstracted of all emotional content. Fellatio may infuse the performer with a feeling of power's intensification; its objective may not be the enhancement of erotic pleasure, but the pleasure that comes with the enhancement of one's feeling of power. By playing the role of the guardian of memory, Ursa dramatizes the intersection of her individual and communal past; by doing so, she is able to loosen the paralysis of historical consciousness: "My veins are centuries meeting" [41].

Dr. Joseph Suglia

Don't be fooled by the cover of this book, this it not urban fiction. The writing is very sohpisticated as i read it for college, it is not erotica. That being said, the subject matter of this novel is fairly dark, covering everything from pedifile lesbianism, domestic abuse, and rape. What I like is that the book potrays sex in a very realistic light, a double edged sword that can be as beautiful as it is ugly. There is a redemptive quality to the story, and I love the ending if you've read it. :) The book covers many issues, but the one element that makes this novel so different is female empowerment through sexuality, and what it means to give and recieve love.